Plug-In Hybrid & Pure Electric Audi Q6 Coming In 2018

According to Car & Driver, not one, but two plug-in versions of Audi’s upcoming Q6 are likely to be offered:

“We’ve learned that Audi’s fully electric, “Model X fighting” Q6 crossover, which is confirmed to arrive in roughly three years, will be just the first version, and it will be joined by other iterations with plug-in hybrid and hydrogen-fuel-cell powertrains. These will come to market after the initial model.”

So, we should see a pure electric Q6 and a plug-in hybrid Q6 within the next few years.

The Q6 will first be shown at the 2015 Frankfurt Motor Show this Fall. Audi claims that the pure electric version will have a range of over 310 miles.

It will be interesting to see how this modular approach of incumbents will fare with electric only design of Tesla. If demand will be there, in 2016 Tesla might be able to produce over 70-90.000 cars all in luxury market. That is not a small feat.

Yeah you could buy that many stations but you then wouldn’t have any money left to build your factory that would be required to manufacture those 500,000 fuel cells to match the giga factory output.

And that would be one expensive factory with lots of employees since even Toyota has admitted that it hasn’t yet figured out how to mass manufacture the fuel cell stacks on an assembly line and instead must build them by hand.

I would like to add that the battery pack in an EV is part of and one of the major costs of its drivetrain just like the fuel cell stack in a HFCV is part of and one of the major costs of its drivetrain.

Since the fuel cell stack in a HFCV that has a range of 310 miles at this point in time is more expensive than the battery pack in an EV that can travel 270 miles you can’t really say the FCV has an advantage there.

Then the more appropriate comparison would be how much would it cost for 5000 hydrogen fueling stations vs. the cost for 5000 EV supercharger stations. Since hydrogen stations CURRENTLY cost between $1 million and $2 million and Tesla Superchargers CURRENTLY cost between $100,000- $175,000. Also hydrogen costs almost twice as much per mile as gasoline and much more per mile than electricity depending on which state. You can see FCVs have no advantage here either.

Now you can speculate all you want on cost of future battery packs and future fuel cell costs and future hydrogen station costs but as of right now and in the near future HFCVs have absolutely no advantages on the long list of comparisons against EVs other than faster fill-up times.

“For the price of one Gigafactory you can buikd more then 5000 stations at today’s rather unrealistic station prices.”
That’s a very odd an contrived comparison. The right comparison would be that you can build 10x the multi-stall supercharger stations for the price of one single/dual pump hydrogen station.

The comparison to Gigafactory would be the price of a factory that can supply enough fuel cells and hydrogen tanks for 500k HFCVs a year. Who knows how much that would cost.

I’d like to add one more thing. That article looses all credibility when it posts quotes like this jewel:

“They are faster to refuel and have much longer ranges than electric ones,” the analyst said. “It can take just five minutes to refuel a hydrogen car for a range of 400 miles, compared to up to a seven hour charge for an electric vehicle to travel just 200 miles.”

First of all there are no HFCV available that have a 400 miles range. The Mirai has a range of 310 miles and the Hyundai Tucson FCV has a range of 265 miles. Likewise the Tesla has a range of 270 miles.

Second a fuel cell can take 5-10 minutes with the current stations. With a Tesla Supercharger it certainly won’t take 7 hours for 200 miles. That’s ridiculous. 200 miles would take only 30 minutes on a 120 kw supercharger. This “analyst” is either woefully ignorant of his area of expertise or maliciously leaving out information to malign EVs. Either one isn’t good.

So from that point on any other information in the article is suspect and has to be taken with a grain of salt.

What that article boils down to is a bunch of gas companies loosely agreeing that they are, as the article points out, “aiming” to have 400 stations in 8 years by 2023. And it will cost them about a half a billion dollars.

Meanwhile today in 2015 there are already 203 Supercharger stations in the US alone. Worldwide there are 468. And those are just the station numbers. Since there is more than 1 supercharger per station there are a total of 2,631 superchargers worldwide.I wonder how many there will be in 2023?

First of all all FCV need battery. Mirai has 1,6 kWh one – so you still need to build a factories to produce them. Second you use superchargers only for 10% of your charging, rest is at home so you need only 10X les of them than gasoline or hydrogen pumps. Hydrogen stations are 10X more expensive than superchargers and you need 10X more of them plus you still need new battery factories. FCV need 3X more elctricity than EV for one mile. So please let me know the logic behind FCV – I dont see it.

Has someone published (in a refereed journal or conference) a study showing the full cycle efficiencies reasonably comparing the fuel cell vs battery powered car? It would be interesting to see what that would look like.

One way to do it would be to choose to start the cycle at the electric power meter. Charge the car and generate hydrogen using electricity. Then work through all the steps in the cycle till you come out with miles driven. Alternatively, you could start with fossil fuel and then work through the cycle from there.